{"id":135,"date":"2025-07-21T22:21:52","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T22:21:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/summergeometry.org\/sgi2025\/?p=135"},"modified":"2025-07-23T16:21:59","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T16:21:59","slug":"week-2-guest-lecture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/summergeometry.org\/sgi2025\/week-2-guest-lecture\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 2: Guest Lecture"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On Wednesday, July 9th, SGI fellows were treated to a one hour presentation by guest lecturer Aaron Hertzmann<\/a>, Principal Scientist at Adobe Research in San Francisco, CA. Aaron was introduced by SGI fellow Amber Bajaj, who among other accomplishments, noted that Aaron was recently recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)\u2019s\u00a0SIGGRAPH<\/a>\u00a0professional society \u201cfor outstanding achievement in computer graphics and interactive techniques\u201d and correspondingly\u00a0awarded the Computer Graphics Achievement Award. The title of the talk was \u201cToward a Theory of Perspective: Perception in Pictures\u201d and began on a personal note, with Aaron conveying how he was often critical of his own art differing from the corresponding photo he would take of the scene he was illustrating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From that anecdotal example, Aaron expanded his talk to cover topics of human perception, vision, theory of perspective, and much more, weaving it all together to paint a compelling picture of what factors contribute to what we, as humans, perceive as more accurate representations of our three dimensional reality on a two dimensional medium. He made a compelling point that, while single point perspective is typically how cameras capture scenes and that single point linear perspective is a common tenant of formal art classes, multi-point perspective more faithfully represents how we remember our experiences. In a world of electronics, digital imagery, and automation, it was striking how the lecturer made it clear that artists are still able to convey an image more faithful to the experience than digital cameras and rendered three dimensional imagery can capture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Key points from Aaron\u2019s talk:<\/p>\n\n\n\n